DOJ Indicts Former Cuban President as Trump Ratchets Up Pressure

The U.S. government indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro in federal court Wednesday for his alleged role in shooting down planes belonging to Cuban exiles in 1996.

Castro, 94, and five others were charged in Miami with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, four counts of murder, and two counts of destruction of aircraft related to when the Cuban military shot down planes over the Florida Straits on a humanitarian mission to find refugees trying to escape Cuba, killing four people. Castro is accused of giving the order to fire.

The planes belonged to Brothers to the Rescue, a group founded by Cuban exiles that searched for Cubans fleeing the island in rafts. Three of the people killed were U.S. citizens, while one was a U.S. permanent resident.

“For nearly 30 years, the families of four murdered Americans have waited for justice,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a press conference in Miami Wednesday. “My message today is clear: The United States and President Trump does not and will not forget its citizens.”

The indictment appears to be part of the Trump administration’s growing pressure campaign to force regime change in the country.

“This isn’t a show indictment,” Blanche stressed when announcing the news. “There is a warrant for his arrest. We expect that he will show up here by his own will or by another way”.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has invoked the U.S.’s January capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro when discussing Cuba, raising the possibility of Castro meeting the same fate. At the time, Rubio said, “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I would be concerned, at least a little bit.”

For months, the U.S. has blocked oil shipments from arriving into Cuba, resulting in electricity blackouts across the country and protests in the capital, Havana. Earlier on Wednesday, Rubio posted a video message in Spanish addressed to the Cuban people.

“The reason you are forced to survive without electricity is not due to an oil blockade by America,” Rubio said, instead blaming the Cuban government for plundering “billions of dollars” and preventing electricity, food, and fuel from reaching the Cuban people.

Cuba’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs replied in his own post on X, saying, “The reason why the U.S. Secretary of State lies so repeatedly and unscrupulously when referring to Cuba and trying to justify the aggression to which he subjects the Cuban people is not ignorance or incompetence. He knows full well that there is no excuse for such a cruel and ruthless aggression.”

This story has been updated.

The president has turned his aim against the Senate parliamentarian amid his broiling quarrel with the Republican Party.

Donald Trump publicly lashed out against Elizabeth MacDonough Wednesday, writing on Truth Social that the upper chamber’s nonpartisan adviser should be thrown out because she was appointed by a Democrat years ago, and because of her staunch opposition to including bits and pieces of the SAVE Act in budget reconciliation bills—a position she is required to take by virtue of her job.

“Over the years, she has been brutal to Republicans, but not so to the Dumocrats—So why has she not been replaced?” Trump wrote. “There are many fair people who would be qualified for that vital job.

“The Republicans play a very soft game compared to the Dumocrats. It is their single biggest disadvantage in politics. The Dumocrats cheat, lie, and steal, especially when it comes to Votes in Elections, but stick together, whereas the Republicans allow the Elizabeth MacDonoughs of the World to stay in power, and brutalize us,” Trump continued.

MacDonough became the first woman to serve as Senate parliamentarian in 2012, after she was appointed by then–Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada. In his post, Trump incorrectly claimed that MacDonough was appointed by former President Barack Obama, although she was hired during his second term.

The Senate parliamentarian’s role is to advise lawmakers on both chambers’ rules and procedures, and to review spending packages for line items that the Senate cannot make good on. She is also required to oppose policy-oriented provisions in reconciliation bills, a regulation known as the “Byrd rule.”

Yet MacDonough earned the ire of the president over the weekend for doing exactly that, when she nixed the last line item in the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill: a $1 billion allowance for security funding for Trump’s White House ballroom.

She ruled that the funding provision could not be included as it violated budget reconciliation rules in its current form, an outcome that surprised no one on either side of the aisle, reported Fox News.

Trump was so irate about MacDonough’s decision, however, that he reportedly phoned Senate Majority Leader John Thune to fire her. Thune was not responsive to the request.

“We’re going through a process that we go through every time we have a reconciliation bill and the people on both sides are mad at the parliamentarian,” Thune told NOTUS Tuesday, clarifying that he would not consider firing MacDonough. “That’s been true.”

Thune’s spokesperson Ryan Wrasse said in a social media post over the weekend that the party would continue to revise the language of the legislation until it earned MacDonough’s approval. “None of this is abnormal during a Byrd process,” Wrasse wrote Saturday.

Apparently unsatisfied with Thune’s response, Trump has brought his attacks against MacDonough into broad daylight, offering up her continued employment to the court of public opinion.

In the same lengthy Truth Social post, Trump urged Republicans to “kill the filibuster” (something that the party will likely never do) and pass the SAVE Act, the voter restriction bill that was shelved earlier this month.

“If we don’t pass at least one of these two provisions quickly, you will never see another Republican President again,” Trump wrote, going on to suggest that Democrats will henceforth be able to create two additional states out of Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. He also claimed that Democrats would pack the Supreme Court with as many as 21 justices and eliminate the filibuster anyway.

“Get smart and tough Republicans, or you’ll all be looking for a job much sooner than you thought possible!” Trump concluded.

For all his bellyaching, the cost of Trump’s White House ballroom project has vastly exceeded his initial projections. Last summer, Trump told the American public that the renovation would cost $200 million and be paid for entirely by private donations. In the months since, Trump has tacked on extra construction to the site and doubled its construction expenses to $400 million.

The price tag grew to $1 billion when Republicans offered to ramp up security at the site, offering taxpayer dollars to foot the bill in the wake of another assassination attempt on the president’s life last month.

Police officers who defended the Capitol on January 6, 2021, are suing the Trump administration over its creation of a $1.776 billion slush fund for President Trump’s allies who claim they were unfairly targeted.

The lawsuit, filed by former Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn and current Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges in U.S. District Court, alleges that the fund is illegal and violates the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, which states the government can’t pay debts “incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” They note that the fund could be used to pay the rioters, and also fund violent organizations.

“If allowed to begin making payments, the fund will directly finance the violent operations of rioters, paramilitaries, and their supporters who threatened plaintiffs’ lives that day, and continue to do so,” the officers’ lawyers wrote in the legal filing. “Militias like the Proud Boys will use money from the fund to arm and equip themselves. The fund will grant their [past] acts of violence legal imprimatur.”

The plaintiffs are asking for a federal judge to declare the fund unlawful, to block officials from setting it up, and to reverse any payments that have already been made. The lawsuit alleges that creating the fund also broke federal law, as the government can only settle lawsuits after the attorney general declares that such a payment “is in the interest of the United States.”

“The payment of $1.776 billion into the Anti-Weaponization Fund to settle Trump v. IRS was patently not ‘in the interest of the United States,’” the lawsuit states. “Rather, it was a misappropriation of taxpayer funds orchestrated by the President to reward his allies and the rioters who committed violence in his name.”

It will be interesting to see where this lawsuit goes, and whether it reaches the Supreme Court, which may or may not rule in favor of the president. One hopes that it would see the legal problems with a fund that the president can spend on people who break the law in his name.

Democrats are doing what they can to stop President Donald Trump’s weaponization of the Justice Department and his self-serving use of taxpayer money.

On Wednesday morning, Representative Jamie Raskin, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, moved to subpoena acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and other officials involved in the creation of a $1.8 billion slush fund, which is expected to be used to pay out Trump allies who feel they were wronged by previous administrations.

The committee vote on the subpoena will be Wednesday afternoon. Republicans have the numbers to block it, though Scott MacFarlane of MeidasTouch noted that “it’s not a favorable vote politically.”

Trump’s slush fund was announced on Monday by the Department of Justice (remember when that used to be an independent body?) as part of a settlement in Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. The lawsuit was filed over the president’s tax returns, which were leaked to the press by an IRS contractor in 2018 after Trump repeatedly refused to release them.

Critics and policy experts have labeled the slush fund one of the most blatantly corrupt moves the Trump administration has ever made, and Democrats seem to agree.

In addition to the subpoena, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee and the Ways and Means Committee submitted a congressional inquiry to the White House on Wednesday containing 10 questions about what the hell is going on. They are similarly questioning the president’s newfound immunity from any IRS investigations into his and his family’s tax returns.

“The American people and the world just witnessed one of the most brazen acts of public corruption and self-dealing in American history,” the inquiry reads.

The president said he is in no rush to end the Iran war—and could be about to drag his own party down in the process.

One day after promising to end his Middle East conflict in “two or three days,” Donald Trump told reporters that he is in “no hurry” to make a deal with Iran.

“Everyone is saying, ‘Oh, the midterms,’” Trump said to reporters at Joint Base Andrews Wednesday. “I’m in no hurry.”

It’s a dramatically different timeline from the one Trump offered Tuesday, in which the president stated in no uncertain terms that Tehran had until Sunday to come to the negotiating table.

“I’m saying two or three days. Maybe Friday, Saturday, Sunday, something,” Trump said outside the White House as construction workers hammered away at his $1 billion ballroom project. “A limited period of time. Because we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon. If they had a nuclear weapon, they would start with Israel, they would blow it up and they would blow it up fast. But they would blow it up.”

“It would be nuclear holocaust,” Trump said, imagining the future if Iran were to develop a nuclear weapon.

But now it seems the president is happy to take his time, a move that could hurt Republican candidates come November. The vast majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the war. A New York Times/Siena poll released Monday revealed that some 64 percent of the country feels that going to war with Iran was the wrong decision, while more than half of respondents said that the war will not be worth its cost.

The war itself—which has so far lasted roughly 12 weeks—is costing the U.S. about $1 billion per day, according to early estimates by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. But Trump’s warmongering has made life more expensive for people everywhere, due to the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on several major oil and gas facilities.

The average cost of gas nationwide is $4.55 per gallon, with large swaths of the U.S. pushing $5 a gallon, according to the AAA’s price tracker. That’s about 50 percent higher than prices were before the war started.

Costs have also gone up for the rest of the world, a reality that has only aggravated U.S. alliances.

The situation has become so dire that Trump’s Cabinet members have stopped speculating as to when prices will actually go back down. Analysts, meanwhile, have projected that gas and oil costs will likely continue to climb—potentially even after midterms.

Republicans are already frustrated with Trump for backing primary candidates who openly support him, rather than candidates who are likely to perform well in a general election. If the war is still dragging on when voters head to the polls in the fall, who knows what will happen to the GOP.

Jeff Bezos is still sucking up to President Trump, even as Trump’s approval rating is at an all-time low.

In an interview with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin Wednesday morning, the billionaire Amazon founder was asked about what he thought of President Trump’s second term amid tariffs and the war in Iran, and the tech CEO went out of his way to praise the president.

“I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term,” Bezos said. “Trump has lots of good ideas and been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due.”

“I’m on the side of America, and that’s where business leaders should be,” Bezos continued.

Earlier in the interview, Bezos was asked point-blank whether he is trying to placate Trump, citing the Melania documentary that Amazon Prime made about the first lady.

“The Melania thing is a falsehood that will not die,” Bezos said, denying that he personally had anything to do with producing the movie or that a deal was reached at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. But he still defended the documentary as a “good business decision.”

“It did very well in theaters, it’s done very well on streaming, people are very curious about Melania, so even though I had nothing to do with it, you know, it appears that the Amazon team made a very wise business decision,” Bezos said.

Amazon spent $40 million to acquire Melania and spent $35 million to market the film, and only ended up making about $16.7 million from its worldwide theatrical release. Based on those figures, it can hardly be considered a good business decision, unless the goal was to curry favor with the White House.

Bezos is ignoring Trump’s negative effect on the economy, from his arbitrary tariffs to the impact of the Iran war, because he wants to benefit from being on Trump’s good side. Americans are struggling as a result, and they’ve lost confidence in the president. But not Bezos, who has gone for broke in licking Trump’s boots. He’s shifted the newspaper that he owns, The Washington Post, further toward the right, losing thousands of subscribers, and has decimated the publication’s staff with layoffs. But none of that matters if it keeps the president from messing with your cash flow.

MAGA loyalists may be winning their primaries—but the Republican Party isn’t so sure that their winning streak will last through November.

Several of Donald Trump’s endorsees won their primaries over the last week, beating out prominent conservative Trump critics including Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy and Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie. But the president’s wins are creating a new headache for his legislative allies.

Republicans on Capitol Hill are concerned that Trump’s exclusive focus on pushing his political acolytes will come at a cost to their legislative majority in the upper and lower chambers, Politico reported Tuesday.

“Those so-called victories over the last couple weeks are just a mirage. They are self-owns,” one senior Senate Republican operative told the outlet. “We’re not actually beating Democrats, and we’re not actually advancing legislation. Instead, gas is up 45 percent due to our actions and the President’s decision to go to war with Iran. He’s focused on the ballroom. He’s announced a $1.8 billion restitution fund with zero details or congressional authority to do so. It just is crazy.”

Cassidy, in the few days since his recent loss, has morphed into something of a free agent apparently unbeholden to the Republican Party or the president: On Tuesday, the Louisiana lawmaker voted in favor of the war powers resolution for the first time, advancing the Democratic-led effort to end the Iran war.

“There are still many, many months to go before the election, and this president is going to have to continue to deal and work with, and partner with, or battle with this group of lawmakers,” Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told reporters after the vote. “Even though Bill Cassidy lost his primary, he is still a voting member of the Senate until January.… So the president may have just opened some opportunities for people.”

Lawmakers are also reportedly grumbling about Trump’s choice to endorse Ken Paxton, Texas’s scandal-laden attorney general, for the Lone Star State’s GOP senatorial primary instead of Senator John Cornyn. Trump directly contradicted Senate Majority Leader John Thune by picking his own man in the race, and created new problems for the GOP’s fundraising arm, which had already spent some $90 million supporting Cornyn’s candidacy.

Trump’s preference boils down to loyalty, according to Punchbowl News: Paxton has been “extremely loyal” to the president, while Cornyn was apparently “very late in backing” Trump’s 2024 presidential bid.

It was a gamble and a loss for the nation’s conservative party, which had twisted and wrought itself in order to earn the president’s favor. Cornyn has done much to support other Republican candidates over the course of his career, becoming one of the party’s biggest earners by bringing in more than $400 million for auxiliary races.

Paxton and Cornyn are slated for a runoff race on May 26. But Trump’s choice could cost Republicans more than the Senate seat as the party is forced to decide whether to divert more financial resources to Texas in support of Cornyn or to reserve the funds for battleground states such as Georgia, Michigan, Maine, and Ohio.

Further still, the president appears to be throwing caution to the wind as he fails to adequately address—or solve—the nation’s teetering oil and gas crisis. The average cost of gas nationwide is $4.53 per gallon, with large swaths of the U.S. pushing $5 a gallon, according to the AAA’s price tracker. That’s about 50 percent higher than prices were before Trump sparked a war with Iran. In some areas of California, such as Mono County, fuel costs are above $7 per gallon.

Meanwhile, Trump is planning to spend billions of dollars to reshape Washington in his image by way of his White House ballroom project, the “Triumphal Arch” near Arlington National Cemetery, repainting the Reflecting Pool at the National Mall, installing a golf course next to the Potomac, and plastering his face and name on federal buildings.

Donald Trump’s allies are racing to get a piece of his $1.8 billion slush fund.

Michael Caputo served in the Trump administration during his first term as a campaign strategist and spokesperson at the Department of Health and Human Services, where he interfered with CDC findings on Covid. He is now seeking $2.7 million in damages from the government, claiming his life was upended after being investigated as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe in 2016.

“I was the target of the illegal Crossfire Hurricane investigation and our family suffered greatly during that dark era of political weaponization,” Caputo wrote in a letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche obtained by CNN. He claimed he was still under FBI investigation as recently as December 2025.

“They found nothing; we lost everything,” he wrote.

Caputo resided in Russia in the 1990s while an employee of the U.S. government. The Mueller report determined he had helped arrange a meeting between Roger Stone—Trump’s campaign manager and close associate—and a Russian agent, for the purpose of sharing information about Hillary Clinton.

But who cares what FBI investigations say when your buddy is president? Now Caputo can get a huge chunk of taxpayer money because he thinks he was wronged by people Trump doesn’t like.

Caputo is the first to publicly seek damages after the slush fund was created, but he won’t be the last.

The Department of Justice has not said exactly who can profit off the fund, but hundreds of Trump allies—including January 6 rioters and members of Trump’s own super PAC—could theoretically get a piece of the pie.

Despite losing his primary battle Tuesday night, Representative Thomas Massie came out swinging in his concession speech. 

The Kentucky congressman came out to chants of “Massie, Massie!” from his supporters, and referenced AIPAC’s backing of his Trump-endorsed opponent, Ed Gallrein. 

“I would’ve come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv,” Massie quipped. “I did get the call through though, I have called and conceded the race. We’ve been honorable the whole time, and we’re gonna stay that way.” 

Massie drew the ire of the president after breaking with him on key issues, including aid to Israel, the war in Iran, and perhaps most notable of all, the Epstein files. Trump attacked Massie relentlessly and practically campaigned in his backyard, but the congressman didn’t let up on his stances. Despite his loss,  Massie vowed to press on in his final seven months on the job. 

“By the way, today is the six-month anniversary of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. We’ve taken out two dozen CEOs, an ambassador, a prince, a prime minister, a minister of culture, and that was just six months. I’ve got seven months left in Congress,” Massie said as the crowd began chanting his name. 

MAGA voters are becoming more and more disillusioned with the president’s performance.

“Matt from Las Vegas” tore into Donald Trump during a call-in segment on Real America’s Voice Tuesday, furious with the White House about how it has handled the Iran war—and the narrative the administration has packaged and sold to its voter base in the interim.

“If we so decimated Iran’s Navy and Air Force, how come we can’t get a ship through the Strait of Hormuz?” asked the caller. “Whose intelligence are they insulting?

“If they don’t have a Navy, how can they stop ships? What are they using to stop ships and redirect ships?” the caller continued. “I’m being lied to by my own government and, I hate to say, Mr. Trump. And I love Donald Trump. But you know, all this—they’re annihalating—they’re full of shit.”

“Iran won this round, as far as I’m concerned,” he added.

The cost of oil and gas has gone through the roof since the war began, a fact that has only been aggravated by Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for the region’s trade.

The average cost of gas nationwide is $4.53 per gallon, with large swaths of the U.S. pushing $5 a gallon, according to the AAA’s price tracker. That’s about 50 percent higher than prices were before the war started. In some areas of California, such as Mono County, fuel costs are above $7 per gallon.

The situation has become so dire that Trump’s Cabinet members have stopped speculating as to when prices will actually go back down. Analysts, meanwhile, have projected that gas and oil costs will likely continue to climb—potentially even after the midterms.

The strait has largely remained closed, despite several attempts to reopen the trade point amid rocky peace negotiations.

The war itself—which has so far lasted roughly 12 weeks—is costing the U.S. about $1 billion per day, according to early estimates by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Matt from Las Vegas further claimed that Iran had Trump “by the short hairs” over the economic disruption, and had put the White House in a position in which it had to beg China for help.

“And I kind of think that we’re a paper tiger, just like Russia,” the caller concluded.

The show host, Eric Bolling, pushed back, claiming that Iran’s “mosquito boats” and underwater mining operation were sufficient to keep the area on lockdown.

“We didn’t lose, they got crushed, they’re clearly the losers on this,” Bolling said desperately.